Oracle Corp was very quick to react to Informix Corp’s acquisition of Red Brick Systems Inc yesterday. Neil Mendelson, a senior director of Oracle’s data warehousing division, said the $35m price tag was high for a company losing money from quarter to quarter and with a market share of less than 5%. There’s no upside to this said Mendelson. He claimed there was 100% overlap between the Red Brick and Informix product lines. Informix now has four databases and no decision support tools he claimed. Mendelson said that even if the Red Brick technology was of any value, it wasn’t possible to acquire core technology. Informix had tried to do so before, with the DataBlades object software it acquired from Illustra Technologies Inc, and then failed to integrate, he said.
